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August 28, 2006

Necessary Accounting

By Caroline Glick

Today two groups of protesters are gathered outside the
Prime Minister's Office. The Movement for Quality Government
is demanding the establishment of an official commission of
inquiry, headed by a Supreme Court justice to investigate
the handling of the war in Lebanon. Down the road, IDF
reservists are demanding that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,
Defense Minister Amir Peretz and IDF Chief of General Staff
Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz resign.

The critical question arising from the separate protests is
whether or not the country's current political and military
leadership are capable of drawing the proper lessons from
the war. If Israel's national and military leaders are
incapable of drawing the appropriate lessons, then there is
an urgent need to embrace the reservists' demand that both
the political and military leaders of the country resign.

Currently, the Israeli public is referring to the latest war
as the Second Lebanon War. Yet this is untrue. The latest
war was fought on two fronts - Lebanon and Gaza. It was
precipitated by Palestinian aggression against Israel from
Gaza. By referring to the war as the Lebanon War, the
regional nature of the war is ignored. The name does more to
confuse than to clarify what just befell us.

In many respects, the ability of the Olmert government and
the IDF to learn from their experience can be assessed by
how they are reacting to events in the Palestinian Authority
as they have unfolded against the backdrop of Hizbullah's
perceived victory in Lebanon. Specifically, their refusal to
acknowledge the role Fatah and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas are
playing in the current situation is a cause for alarm. This
refusal manifests itself in Israel's reaction to both the
abduction of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf
Wiig a week and a half ago in Gaza and the continued
captivity of IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

Centanni and Wiig were kidnapped by PA security forces
associated with Fatah. When their demand that Abbas pay them
money in exchange for Centanni and Wiig was refused, the
kidnappers sold their hostages to a Fatah terror cell that
currently holds them. That is, Abbas's security forces and
his Fatah movement rather than Hamas are responsible for the
two men's fate.

Moreover, knowledgeable Palestinian sources state with
certainty that Shalit has been held since his abduction in
June in Khan Yunis by Fatah and Hamas terrorists. Khan Yunis
is controlled by forces loyal to Fatah strongman Muhammad
Dahlan.

If Abbas were interested in seeing Shalit released, his
forces would be able to free Shalit at any time. But Abbas
is not interested in releasing Shalit. Rather, he is
demanding that the Hamas government order Shalit be
transferred to his control to enable him to negotiate his
exchange for hundreds of terrorists imprisoned in Israel.
Abbas's dispute with Hamas is over who will get the credit
for springing Palestinian terrorists from prison. Hamas is
unwilling to give up the glory, and so is Abbas. So Shalit
remains in captivity.

Abbas's handling of both hostage situations leads to one
conclusion: He is part of the problem. If the government
wanted to bring about Shalit's release, it would be placing
all the responsibility for his capture and captivity on
Abbas. It would have isolated Abbas in the infamous Mukata
in Ramallah, just as it isolated Yasser Arafat there during
Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. But the government is
doing none of these things.

The government is not acting against Abbas and Fatah because
it is ideologically unable to define Abbas or Fatah or the
Palestinian Authority as Israel's enemy. Olmert and his
colleagues require the fiction of Abbas as a moderate leader
and the fiction of Fatah as a moderate counterweight to
Hamas to justify their planned policy of retreating from
Judea and Samaria and their current policy of continuing
construction of the security fence and removing scattered
outpost communities. Both these policies involve Israeli
relinquishment of control over the territorial expanse of
Judea and Samaria.

The stretegic logic that stands at the core of the
government's policies is that territory is a liability, that
static defenses like the security fence, augmented by the
air force and commando units, will be able to defend
Israel's cities and towns from attack.

Unfortunately, the IDF shares this strategic logic. This
fact was made clear Monday by Division Commander Brig.-Gen.
Guy Tzur in remarks before reserve officers about the
results of the war in Lebanon. According to officers who
participated in the closed meeting, Tzur told them that
Israel was better off for not achieving its strategic
objective of dismantling Hizbullah in Lebanon.

We won the war in 1967 and since then we have been paying
the price of that victory, he said. We won the war in 1982
and for 18 years we were forced to remain in the Lebanese
quagmire, he continued. That is - according to Tzur, who
claimed that he was repeating a statement made by OC Central
Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh - it is not in Israel's
interest to conquer and control territory used by its
enemies to attack it. Victory, which requires us to hold
territory, is by this reasoning, not in Israel's interest.

This was the strategic logic that directed both the
government and the IDF in the war in Lebanon. This was the
logic that brought the General Staff, Olmert and Peretz to
believe that it was possible to win the war with air power
and special forces alone. This was the logic that informed
the IDF's decision to concentrate the belated ground
offensive in the condensed territory of the villages along
the northern border and not order the forces to take over
the territorial expanses around the villages, which
controlled the villages, while quickly advancing to the
Litani River. This was the logic that caused the IDF to
fight against Hizbullah as if it were fighting terror cells
in Jenin.

The IDF reservists who have set up camp across from the
Prime Minister's Office and demand the resignation of
Israel's top political and military leaders are united in
their deep sense of frustration. They share the view that
their fighting methods in Lebanon were unsuited to the enemy
they faced in battle. They are correct.

The IDF's campaign did not permanently diminish Hizbullah's
abilities as a fighting force. It did not stop the missile
attacks on northern Israel. It did not bring IDF hostages
Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev home. The campaign failed to
achieve its stated objectives because it lacked a guiding
strategy regarding the control of territory. Olmert, Peretz
and Halutz based the war effort on a view that Israel must
not control territory. And so they adopted the notion that
it would be possible to destroy Hizbullah from the air. When
that concept was proven false, it was replaced with the idea
that special forces augmented by small numbers of regular
combat forces could clean out the villages along the border
and so deal a heavy blow to Hizbullah. When that concept
proved false in Maroun Aras and Bint Jbail, it was replaced
first by paralysis and then by an intellectual breakdown.

This breakdown led to the belated decision to send in three
divisions. This was the right decision, but rather than let
the troops advance as a massed force and so overrun
Hizbullah positions and take control over the heights
surrounding the villages before being sent in to clear out
the bunkers, the massive forces were deployed as if they
were a small force.

The men were concentrated in condensed areas of the villages
and not fanned out along the surrounding heights. Their high
concentration turned them into easy targets for Hizbullah's
anti-tank missiles. The way the troops were deployed suited
all of Hizbullah's comparative advantages while bringing
neither the IDF's advantage of mass nor its advantage of
firepower to bear.

As became clear after the first several days of engagements,
Hizbullah fought neither an offensive nor a defensive war.
It did not attack IDF formations nor did it defend its
battle stations. Its doctrine is simple: bleed Israeli
civilians and IDF units to break Israel's will and humiliate
it.

Its success in achieving its aim was manifested by the
government's decision to sue for a cease-fire. UN Security
Council Resolution 1701 not only cancelled out any tactical
advantage the IDF had managed to gain, it paved the way for
Hizbullah's rearmament and for the deployment of the UNIFIL
force that will act not to dismantle Hizbullah but to
prevent Israel from taking any further action to win the war
decisively. Yet, still clinging to the view that territory
is bad, neither the General Staff, which insists that Israel
won, nor the government, which is begging anti-Israel
governments in Europe to send their forces to Lebanon, is
capable of understanding what just happened.

This brings us back to the demand for the formation of a
judicial commission of inquiry. There is no doubt that it is
necessary to conduct a serious review of the war in Lebanon
and Gaza. But there is no way that such a review can be
accomplished by a Supreme Court justice. There are two
principal reasons for this. First, an official commission is
a legal body and its proceedings are legal proceedings. But
the issue of why Israel failed to achieve any of its
objectives in the war is not an issue of law. It is an issue
of policy and military operations. Judges are no more
qualified than the average citizen to investigate these
issues.

Secondly, and more importantly, for the past decade and a
half, the Supreme Court has been leading the offensive
against the notion that Israel should either identify its
enemies or defeat them. For the past 15 years the Supreme
Court has been constricting the tactical freedom of the IDF
in Lebanon, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. It has inserted itself
into military planning and political initiatives in a manner
that has undermined the IDF's ability to adequately protect
Israeli citizens and territory from assault by outlawing
tactics that contradict the liberal justices' multicultural
and post-nationalist sensibilities. Indeed, it is just these
sensibilities, and the fear of Supreme Court intervention,
that has tied the hands of successive governments and
General Staffs in attempting to confront the growing
unconventional threats to Israel emanating from Hizbullah
and Palestinian terrorist groups.

From all this it becomes self-evident that both the demand
for Olmert, Peretz and Halutz to resign and the demand that
an accounting be made of the mistakes that led Israel to its
strategic defeat in Lebanon are necessary. It is also clear
that the only way that the proper lessons can be drawn is
for the current military and political leadership to be
replaced by alternative leaders capable of understanding the
nature of the threats that surround us. For both objectives
to be achieved, the only commission of inquiry that should
be established is the inquiry of the citizens of the state
that takes place in general elections.

Posted by Robert J. Avrech at August 28, 2006 09:21 AM

Comments

Seraphic Secret is private property, that's right, it's an extension of our home, and as such, Karen and I have instituted two Seraphic Rules and we ask commentors to act respectfully.

1. No profanity.

2. No Israel bashing. We debate, we discuss, we are respectful. You know what Israel bashing is. The world is full of it. Seraphic Secret is one of the few places in the world that will not tolerate this form of anti-Semitism.

That's it. Break either of these rules and you will be banned.

Posted by: Karen Avrech at August 28, 2006 08:15 PM

Posted by: Barefoot Jewess at August 28, 2006 09:41 PM

Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 28, 2006 10:34 PM

Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 28, 2006 10:37 PM

Posted by: David at August 29, 2006 05:12 AM

Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 29, 2006 09:13 AM

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